The Mixed-Up Summer of Lily McLean (6 page)

“What on earth has happened in here? Are you alright, Lily?”

“I feel a bit dizzy,” I reply, truthfully. “Some of the hoops bounced off my head.”

Mrs McKenzie sighs.

“You’d better pop along to the medical room and get an ice pack. And then come back here and clear up all this mess.”

I’m not dizzy from the hoops though, I’m dizzy because the voice was so insistent this time. She wasn’t asking dumb questions, she was bossing me about. Did I hear her right? Why on earth wouldn’t she want me to go to Millport?

By the time I’ve finished lying to the nurse about my near-fatal skull injury, and reordering the gym cupboard one-handed whilst holding an ice pack to my head – hoping the voice wouldn’t speak again – Mrs McKenzie is blowing the final whistle. I’ve missed my last ever primary school P.E. lesson.

So being haunted isn’t a total disaster.

The most awful things that can happen on a train:

• Hurtling past the platform and smashing into the ticket office.
  
• Seeing a drunk jaikie, and realising he’s a relation.
  
• Getting ‘the talk’ from your mum in a packed carriage.
  

“Get up and get dressed, Lily. We’re going shopping!” shouts Mum and I fling myself out of bed.

It’s early on Saturday morning and Mum has kept her promise to buy me some new clothes.

“I’m coming, Mum!” I call, anxious not to wind her up before we’ve even left the house. I fling on my only clean clothes: a denim skirt that used to belong to Jenna and my favourite black hoodie.

It’s a rare day that Jenna and I are both in a good mood, and today is one of them. She has been bribed to babysit with a promise of £10 to go with her friends to see the new vampire movie. And I am uber-excited at the prospect of a day out in the city with the added bonus of some time alone with Mum.

“You look nice, dear,” she says, as we walk along to the station together.

“So do you, Mum,” I reply, and for once I’m serious. Mum’s wild curly hair is tied back in a ponytail with a pretty green scarf and her skirt is a matching dark green silk. She looks quite respectable. She is even wearing almost-ordinary shoes, instead of those
horrible spiky-heeled suede boots she usually wears, which make her look as if she is dressing up as a witch for Halloween.

Largs station is right in the middle of the town. It’s a relatively new station because twenty years ago a train failed to stop and hurtled right into the ticket office, crashed through the front of the station and ploughed into two shops, demolishing them. The train ended up at the taxi rank on Main Street. Gran says it’s a miracle nobody was killed. Every time I stand on this platform, I imagine that the train won’t stop again.

“This is lovely, isn’t it, Lil?” says Mum happily. “It’s so nice to have a wee day out, just the two of us.”

I sit opposite Mum on the train as it speeds through the Ayrshire countryside, wondering if I should perhaps mention to her that almost every day this week a voice has whispered urgently in my ear. And that more recently it’s been pretty clear that it thinks I shouldn’t go on holiday. But I’ve got the same problem I had with telling Rowan. Mum will either think I’ve lost the plot completely or that I’m coming up with a particularly silly excuse not to go away with Gran.

“Which shops do you want to go to first?” asks Mum cheerfully. Gran has given her money to buy me clothes, so Mum doesn’t have that strained, this-is-costing-me-more-than-I-can-afford look she often has when she is out shopping for us.

I shrug and say I don’t mind. I really don’t.

“You’re very quiet these days, Lily,” says Mum thoughtfully. She leans forward and takes my hand in hers. I snatch it back.

Not here, Mum,
I think.

“Is there anything worrying you? You know the kind of thing… growing up, body changes? Do you have any questions you want to ask me?”

I turn crimson with embarrassment. Could she not have discussed these things when we were in the privacy of her
bedroom last weekend? Not here, on a train crowded with Saturday shoppers.

“Mum, we’re on the train,” I groan, hoping nobody has heard us. “Please don’t talk about that stuff
now
.”

“It’s important stuff, Lily,” says Mum. “You’re at an age when you need as much reliable information as possible. You mustn’t feel embarrassed. You can ask your old mum anything.”

I am in a positive agony of embarrassment by now. My face is on fire. My whole body is burning.

“I’ve had the talk from the nurse at school, Mum,” I hiss, through clenched teeth. “Can we do this another time, please?”

By now I’m certain that every passenger in the carriage is craning their necks to catch every word. Mum must feel she has humiliated me enough, because she doesn’t say any more about it. Just as well, because if this train had a trapdoor in the floor I would risk death to clamber out on to the railway line.

Mum picks up a
Metro
newspaper from the train seat and starts to read the headlines aloud to me instead.

“Listen to this, Lily! A burglar was caught after he dropped his mobile phone on the floor of the house he was robbing. Pretty stupid, eh?” she trills.

“Hmm,” I murmur, wishing she would just stop talking.

Mum thrusts the paper towards me to show me a photograph of a famous soap star. He is standing outside a courthouse, arms raised in celebration after being cleared of drug dealing.

“He looks totally guilty to me,” she says gleefully. “Look at those shifty eyes.”

I pretend I don’t know her and look steadily out of the grimy window as the landscape changes from rural to urban. We cross the River Clyde and I stare out at the bridges, tall office buildings and the fancy flats lining the riverside. Soon the train is sliding into Glasgow Central and we are spilling out of it on to the platform.

“Right! Primark first I think!” shouts Mum, over the din of the crowds and the traffic. As we stroll up Buchanan Street, we listen to guitar-strumming buskers and laugh at some street theatre guys who loom over us on enormous stilts. I always enjoy Glasgow’s buzz, but I would never want to live so far from the sea.

We head up to Sauchiehall Street and then the Buchanan Galleries. Mum even lets me browse for nearly half an hour in the bookshop while she leafs through home decoration magazines she has no intention of buying.

The shopping expedition goes reasonably well. Mum and I hardly fight at all over my clothes choices, though I get pretty hacked off when she puts her foot down in Topshop.

“I like them,” I say defiantly, holding up a pair of purple leather shorts. Short shorts. “They’re a lovely colour. I’d wear them all the time.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of, Lily,” sighs Mum. “I’m sure they would look ok on a girl of Jenna’s age, but they are completely inappropriate for a wee girl like you.”

I bristle about being called a wee girl, but I guess maybe Gran won’t like the shorts either, and it is her money we’re spending, so I back down and choose denim ones instead.

In a very short time Gran’s money is almost gone. I have three new t-shirts, skinny jeans, two pairs of denim shorts and a pair of canvas shoes, which I particularly love, because they are neon orange and have multi-coloured laces. I like bright colours. Jenna says I have no taste.

Plus Mum buys some new knickers for me, and my first ever bra, but I’m not prepared to discuss
that
humiliation. Mum even insisted on asking the girl in the shop to measure my bra size. My face is still such a bright scarlet that I’m clashing with my new orange shoes.

If I had known she was planning to kit me out for womanhood,
I would never have come on this expedition. I thought I was just here to get summer clothes. I feel tricked.

But also, I have to admit, a bit relieved. Bra ownership isn’t really a major issue for me at the moment, as I have no boobs whatsoever, but I definitely don’t want to start secondary school wearing my age 9–11 vest and pants.

After the considerable trauma of the bra, I’m glad to sit in the coffee shop at the station with Mum. She is nursing a cinnamon latte bought with the rest of Gran’s money, while I sip on a coke, munch on a blueberry muffin and write in the gorgeous new red leather journal I bought with the tenner Gran slipped me last Sunday. Good old Gran.

I am engrossed in my list-making when I get the strange feeling that I’m being watched. I swivel my eyes to the left, pretending that I’m still busy writing. There is someone sitting in the chair beside me. I can see the outline of a girl, but she’s so grey and insubstantial that I know if I put my hand out I will touch air. She’s just a faint, almost featureless outline, like a shimmering bubble. This must be her – the ghost, the voice – visible at last. Well, almost visible.

Slowly and creepily, she leans towards me, her long hair swinging, and she says something, but there’s too much background noise and I can’t make out what she’s saying. I turn my head towards her and look right into her eyes, so dark and grey that they seem at first to be empty sockets. Her features are so fuzzy that I can’t even tell if she is happy or sad.

“Lily. It is you, isn’t it? Can you see me too?” she whispers. “Don’t go away—”

“Are you ok, Lily?” says Mum, with a worried frown. The girl fades into nothingness like a wisp of smoke. “You’re very pale.”

“I’m fine, Mum. I just felt a bit dizzy for a moment,” I reply, feeling decidedly spooked and shaky. Did the girl mean don’t go away
now
or don’t go
away
, like to Millport? She isn’t making
herself very clear, in more ways than one.

“Oh dear, we’d better get you home,” says Mum, standing up and gathering the carrier bags. “The train leaves in five minutes.”

We rush to the platform and climb aboard the Largs train. I lean my head against the cold glass and close my eyes. This is too much, it really is. I need to tell somebody I’m seeing ghosts. I’ll be like the wee boy in that
ParaNorman
movie: ‘I can see dead people.’

No, there’s no way I am saying that out loud.

There’s a loud whistle and the train pulls out of the station.

Mum is chatting away to me when she suddenly gasps and goes silent mid-sentence. I open my eyes and squeeze them shut again. I don’t want to see what is looming in front of us. I would rather have faced my ghost girl again.

My step-dad is lurching along the aisle between the rows of seats. He is looking for a seat, but he’s clearly drunk and people are placing their bags on the empty seats next to them. Nobody wants a drunk jaikie sitting near them.

“’Scuse me, ’scuse me,” he slurs, as he nearly falls into somebody’s lap.

He hasn’t seen Mum yet and if we’re careful, I think that we might escape unnoticed. Mum grabs my hand and hisses at me to get my journal out of the carrier bag on the floor. I bend down to fetch it and she leans down at the same time, pretending to rummage in our bags.

My step-dad sways forward and flings himself clumsily into a seat just three rows from us. The face of the elderly lady directly opposite him is a mask of distaste. He is half lying across the train seat, feet sticking out in the aisle. He looks scruffy and unwashed and I expect he smells pretty unpleasant.

“Just sit quietly and write in your journal,” whispers Mum. “He’ll never know we’re on the train as long as we don’t draw attention to ourselves.”

Mum winds her scarf round her head, covering her hair and part of her face, and then leans her head against the window and closes her eyes. I stare down at my journal as if I’m concentrating really hard, but the words are jumping about on the page. My heart is jumping about in my ribcage too. And my hands are shaking too much to write.

The train carries on rumbling along the rails and I pray silently that he won’t turn around.

I’m not sure exactly who I’m praying to, as I stopped believing in God when I was in Primary 4 and our teacher told us the story of Noah. I didn’t want to believe in a God who would decide to kill everyone in the whole world, except one family, because the majority of people weren’t behaving very nicely. He sent masses of rain and flooded the land, and all those bad people drowned. I’ve read that drowning is one of the worst ways to go, so that makes it even more cruel. My family wouldn’t have made it on to the Ark, that’s for sure. We would have drowned with the rest of the bad guys.

The train whizzes through the countryside, stopping regularly at the small stations on the line. As we stop at Johnstone, Milliken Park and then Howwood, I wonder uneasily when my step-dad is going to get off the train.

Mum has told me many times that he isn’t allowed to come within a five-mile radius of Largs. I picture miles and miles of jagged barbed-wire fence, probably electrified. And a wide circle of armed guards holding the collars of snarling, slavering dogs. I imagine these things because they make me feel safe, even though I know they are silly, and that in real life the only thing preventing my step-dad from turning up at our front door is the legal injunction organised by McTavish and Quipp (the lawyers, obviously, not the cats).

So he can’t be getting off at our station, surely. I begin to feel
quite panicky at the thought of him staying on the train all the way to Largs. What if he follows us home?

“Mum, when’s he going to get off?” I whisper, hearing the anxiety in my voice.

“Next station, I expect, Lily,” says Mum confidently. “He is staying with his mother and she lives out this way.”

The train slows with a screeching of brakes as we approach Glengarnock. My step-dad heaves himself to his feet and staggers towards the doors and it’s as he stands, clutching the rail, waiting for the doors to slide open, that I notice how much weight he has lost. How yellow and papery his skin looks.

He almost falls out of the train and reels towards the station exit. Mum gives me a shaky smile, but her eyes look desperately sad and I feel the same. For the first time since my step-dad came into my life, I feel sorry for him, and not nearly so afraid. He looked pathetic; not the bogeyman I remember. Not that I am sorry to see the back of him. Hopefully I will never have to see him again as long as I live.

The train rumbles on towards Largs, and when I catch sight of the Firth of Clyde glistening in the June sunshine, my heart lifts. We’re home! And with any luck, I’ve left the ghostly girl behind in Glasgow.

“Come on Lil!” smiles Mum, gathering up the bags. “Let’s head home and show everyone what we’ve bought.”

“Not
everything
we’ve bought, Mum,” I say quickly, snatching the bag containing the bra out of her hand, before she reveals it to the world.